The present invention relates to the field of phased array antenna control systems. Optical control of phased array antennas offers important advantages of size, weight, bandwidth, low propogation loss, immunity to electromagnetic radiation, remoting capability and simplified transmit/receive modules. Prior art systems require a large number of precisely time-delayed matched optical elements such as lasers and optical delay segments. The dispersive fiber prism proposed and tested by Esman et al is a convenient means for true time delay (TTD) beamsteering of a phased-array microwave antenna. See Esman, R. D. et al., "Fiber-optic Prism True Time-delay Antenna Feed," IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, 5: 1347. The advantage of that dispersive fiber prism is that it requires only one tunable laser source, compared to the multiple sources needed in the uniform fiber-dispersion approach; see Soref, R. A., 1992, Optical Dispersion Technique for Time-delay Beamsteering, Applied Optics, 31: 7395. However, this approach requires very long lengths of fiber which is undesirable.
Thus, there is a need for an electro-optic transmit and receive phased array antenna control system utilizing a single tunable laser source and employing much shorter lengths of fiber than needed for the dispersive fiber prism approach. There is also a need for such a system that can be readily implemented in the form of a photonic integrated circuit.